George Will stands by sexual assault column

6/20/14 2:00 PM EDT

George Will continued to stand by his controversial op-ed column on sexual assault Friday, even after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decided to drop the columnist from its pages in protest.

In an interview with CSPAN, Will said the Post-Dispatch's decision simply reflected the paper's desire to keep the uproar over his op-ed going.

“They know how to propitiate the rabble,” the columnist said.

In Will's column, published earlier this month, he referred to the “supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault’” and said that universities “make victimhood a coveted status” that “confers privileges.” The column immediately drew widespread criticism for its insensitivity toward rape victims.

In Friday's interview, Will attributed the indignation to the Internet.

"[The Internet] has lowered, erased the barriers to entry into public discourse, that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, the downside is that among the barriers to entry that have been reduced is that you don’t have to know how to read, write, or think you can just come in and shout and call names and carry on,” Will said.

Will also repeated his response to a letter written to him last week by several Democratic senators, in which they said Will was legitimizing the myths that victims of sexual assault work to combat. In the letter, Will said he takes the issue of sexual assault more seriously because he thinks campus assaults should be handled by the criminal justice system and not by universities.

“I think I take sexual assault somewhat more seriously than the senators do because I think there’s a danger now of defining sexual assault so broadly, so capriciously that it begins to trivialize the seriousness of it,” Will said. “When remarks become sexual assault, improper touching … we being to blur distinctions that are important to preserve if you believe as the senators purport to believe, that this is a serious matter.”